Greil Marcus is always an interesting read, never more so than when he is waxing on about his favorite topic, Bob Dylan. I just finished his latest book, Like a Rolling Stone, and found it to be an enlightened look at one of the best, most-important songs of the rock era. Still, Marcus gets a bit wound up at times, and it leads to some highly amusing tangents. He has built a career on finding what must surely be unintended depth in the most banal circumstances. It's OK when he's writing about Dylan, because one expects that there is at least the possibility the singer actually intended some of what Marcus reads into his lyrics and performances. As Marcus winds up Rolling Stone, however, he seems to go off the deep end in search of grand statements where there are none. He somehow finds a way to equate the Pet Shop Boys' cover of the Village People's "Go West" with "Like a Rolling Stone," saying the former "take(s) place in the country 'Like a Rolling Stone' opens up -- that follow(s) the trail left by the way of life the song calls for, that it demands, the cutting of all ties, the refusal of all comforts, even your own name."

One imagines Marcus behind a lecturn, delivering this graniloquent oratory. This isn't just a gay pop duo having fun with a light disco tune recorded by a forerunner in the gay/disco pop genre, but a rallying cry for the wronged and oppressed: "'GO WEST,' sang the chorus," he writes. "'This is our destiny,' Tennant sang, the enormous idea small but undeniable in his mouth. Flags unfurled; the wind blew them straight. The sound was like the sun, the disco beat stirring, the drum machine a twentieth-century Yankee Doodle." Later, the chorus singing behind Tennant is not just a backing track to add texture to the song, but a choir that "stood for all the voices of the dead" in a grand statement about the AIDS crisis. Perhaps. Or maybe it's just a pop song that does carry a bit of sentiment about the treatment of gays and the losses incurred due to AIDS. Academics for years have been derided for their distorted view from the ivory tower, turning what could be lively topics into moribund drags thanks to their over-analytical approach. Induct Professor Marcus into the academy, then, because he has surely sucked the life out of a trivial pop song by looking for something that probably was never never there.

Still, for those who know what they're getting into, for those who are familiar with Marcus' overheated prose (has anyone ever posited the theory that Marcus is the original hypertextualist, his works reading like the transcript of a furious web surfing session where a few casually clicked links can take one far across the cyber-landscape toward an unintended and only loosely related destination? If not, let me be the first) he does open up some intriguing lines of thought that will expand -- if not explode -- the way you think about Bob Dylan and his work. If nothing else, this will make you pull out not just Highway 61 Revisited and Bootleg Series IV: Live 1966, but all of your bootlegs that feature performances of "Like a Rolling Stone." In fact, the most interesting part of the book may well be the track-by-track analysis of the recording session that serves as the epilogue. Reading it, I was amazed that the song came off at all; and having read this book, I was glad it did.